


A Little Peaked

by arenoseAnima



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Gore, i'm sorry for my life and my choices, terrible gormenghast pastiche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:04:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arenoseAnima/pseuds/arenoseAnima
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A heartless mockery of the fine works of Mervyn Peake, starring Kanaya Maryam and Karkat Vantas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Little Peaked

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adaorardor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adaorardor/gifts).



‘I doubt very much that your noctilucent hallucinations will bear any _fucking_ fruit, Lady Maryam,’ Karkat said through the moss-fouled wall of his teeth.  Regardless of his protestations -- and there were many protestations -- he stood on the castle’s crenellations alongside the woman with whom he had fallen into a stormy moirallegiance. He had been standing there lock-kneed for the best part of the night, and the small hours of the morning, during which he would much rather have been wrapped within the oozing confines of his recuperacoon. By now he was certainly beginning to feel faint -- his head spun every time his eyes moved from one mist-wreathed hill to the next -- but admitting his exhaustion and crawling down the winding staircases alone, for he _would_ be alone, his moirail the exalted Lady Maryam being intent on watching the moors outside the castle for the ‘shadow droppers’ she claimed she had seen the evening before, would be an intolerable breach of the manner they had adopted around one another, a manner of loyalty and easy companionship.

‘Language,’ Kanaya told him. Her long, pale hand, pale even for a troll whose delectations were almost exclusively pursued under the shining face of the sun, rested on the wall, and its mate held with unwavering firmness to the handle of a weapon whose like Karkat had never set eyes on before he had met Kanaya in the throes of slaughter in some nameless forest whose boundary fouled no map, troll or human. ‘I told you I saw the . . . _creatures_ ,’ she allowed -- she knew of Karkat’s skepticism regarding the knowledge she had gleaned from the books in the castle’s library, before its unfortunate burning, and the sour wrench of his physiognomy when she applied the terms of her reading had made her swear off any taxonomical term longer than three syllables. ‘Would I lie to you?’

‘Probably.’ Karkat bent, his tired skeleton creaking with the exertions of bringing his overfull think pan closer to the earth, and plucked a loose pebble from the wall like a sandpiper winkling a snail from its shell. He stood to his full, ludicrously unimpressive height once more -- his horns barely met Lady Maryam’s shoulder -- and flung the pebble out into the void beyond the castle that represented the sum total of his life, the experiences he had brought himself to beyond its bosom still seeming more like a string of foggy dreams, despite their representative occupying the empty spaces in his life and home like a moth entering through an open door. The pebble plummeted, whistling in the morning air; whether it ever made contact with the ground far below, neither of them discovered, for their attention was stolen by movement between a pair of far mounds.

‘The correct answer to that question is, in fact, ‘no.’ Also, do you see what I see?’ Kanaya tilted her body between a gap in the crenellations, the precipitous drop beneath threatening to swallow an overbalanced troll into its howling gullet -- such an ‘accident’ had befallen one of Karkat’s fellow young men, a brownblooded kitchen boy, though the suspicion that it had been a calculated attack by the sister of the castle’s smith had never quite released its grip on Karkat’s blood pusher -- and Karkat rested his rough, calloused hand on the small of her back, ready to catch her should her life be tipped into the hands of fate. As the pale pair watched, the distant column cleared the foothills of the mountains that surrounded the castle and widened into a shuffling phalanx whose passage seemed to dissolve the mists that clung to the dew-laden dells amongst the hills.

Kanaya narrowed her eyes. ‘Shadow droppers,’ she said, throwing etymology to the winds, which had begun to pick up in their constant circuit around the crumbling towers of the castle. The muscles of her arm tensed as she lifted her weapon one-handed onto the wall, then hefted it into the spousal embrace of her paired hands. Karkat put his thumbs in his ears. Sure enough, there was time enough only for the black swarm below them to take a single step before Kanaya’s fingers wrapped around the cord dangling from her machine, and she tore it forth, once, twice, thrice, the pained growling of the caged beast that powered the contraption emitting louder and longer each time before it sublimated into the ripping-cloth scream of the chain roaring around its moorings. Karkat had no time and no words loud enough to break the screeching spell of Kanaya’s weapon before she was off, the slap-slap-slap of her feet on the steps reaching to the ground floor all that remained in her wake.

He followed the afterimages of her presence, drawing his own less impressive weapons as he did so; the sickles drank up the darkness in the stairwell and threw it off in glinting spatters when he burst into the light. The heavy wooden gate of the castle stood open, the dirt scraped up in its wake as fresh as the grave of the seventy-sixth Earl. Kanaya’s footprints lingered in the damp earth beyond the walls, and he could just barely make out her figure in the distance, still dashing at ankle-twisting speeds towards the horde. When he reached the demarcation of the clean-swept courtyard and the wet grassy land beyond, he stopped; the last time he had left the castle grounds without notifying one of his caretakers, he had been punished with unrelenting severity. But now his eyes were straining to see Kanaya, her silhouette melding into the black line that had begun to spread across the horizon, and after one last steadying breath he bolted into the fields beyond.

By the time he reached Kanaya, his chest burned with the needles of overhasty breath and his fingers ached for their grip on his sickles. Black, ichorous blood soaked the ground; here and there he could see a twitching limb or a head that had lost correspondence with its body. The screams of Kanaya’s weapon, the sound thickened and deepened by the chain choked with gore, led him to her. She stood amongst a pile of bisected shadow droppers, the last of them still pumping its blood over the grass. Not a one was left standing, and Karkat’s sickles were as clean as the day the last Earl had given them to him -- he had so fiercely hoped that this would be his first chance to dirty their pristine curves. He gave a clod of earth a disconsolate kick, and discovered that it was a disguised eyeball, which flew over a nearby hillock. He squinted after it.

Kanaya wiped a stray rope of intestine from her cheek. ‘What a disappointing invasion. Karkat, thank you for your... help.’

‘Next time,’ Karkat said, ‘you had better god damn wait for me. Why do you have all the fun?’

‘Perhaps we should work on your sprinting.’ She took his hand, their fingers interweaving, and the small Earl and his gore-streaked moirail began to walk home.


End file.
